George W. Bush has calculated that the future does not vote. His Administration has abandoned its obligations to posterity, from the environment to the budget to Social Security to regulation affecting the health and safety of Americans in the emerging digital workplace. Moral lapses notwithstanding, Bill Clinton acted as a responsible steward in raising taxes on affluent Americans to balance the budget and begin to pay down the national debt—a process set in motion by George H.W. Bush and now reversed by George W. Bush. We judge parents by the sacrifices they make in their present comfort for the sake of their children's well-being and education. At a certain point a parent realizes that he lives—he certainly works—for his children. That is the big moral discovery of adult life, and we should hold to it in judging leaders. The family models the polity. The test we apply to parents—how responsibly they care for the next generation—should apply to presidents. Bush fails the test.

Fails it—and for what? To pay off campaign contributions from corporate polluters; to redirect the Social Security surplus to tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; and to throw money at the Pentagon for Cold War weapons he criticized during the election campaign and for a missile-defense system against the menace posed by Iran and North Korea—improving relations with which would undercut the rationale for the system. The President's new budget, as Al Hunt pointed out in The Wall Street Journal recently, cuts health insurance for poor children; shifts "the major burden of funding" for toxic-chemical cleanups from chemical companies to taxpayers; includes the smallest increase in education spending in seven years; and cuts the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program while funding the Crusader, an eighty-ton howitzer designed to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe (and made by a defense contractor whose advisers include George H.W. Bush). The budget also seeks to make permanent the $1.3 trillion tax cut of 2001, a step that would cost an additional $343 billion in the first year of enactment and $4 trillion over the next decade.

The bad numbers indicate worse values. Bush's overriding domestic priority seems to be to empty the Treasury and endanger the retirement of a generation in order to benefit the few, the powerful, and the connected. This is Social Darwinist economics. If, to use the social historian Barrington Moore Jr.'s distinction, a "decent society" is one that seeks to mitigate the disadvantages conferred by nature, then Bush has set our course toward an indecent society, in which to those to whom much is given, more is given. That has been the pattern of his life. Ending the estate tax is Bush's signature achievement. Passed by Congress in 1916 to "break up the swollen fortunes of the rich," the estate tax gets all its revenue from the top 1.4 percent of estates (and two thirds from the top 0.2 percent)—roughly the Bush Christmas-card mailing list. The philosophy of the estate tax, the conservative financial writer James Glassman has said, is to "promote equality of opportunity." Equal opportunity can at best be approximated, Glassman added, "but why not use the tax code to discourage a gigantic head start?" But Bush does not see anything offensive to the democratic ethos in gigantic head starts. He wants to leave an America in his own image, a country of sons standing upon their fathers. He is governing from his biography.

One need look no further than Bush's energy plan, heavy with subsidies for his friends in big oil, or the cosmic shrug of his global-warming policy. The former extends his experience in Texas to the nation, the latter to the world. When Texas was faced with a pollution crisis, the state's equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency urged him to impose mandatory emissions standards on corporate polluters. Instead Bush asked the polluters to devise a plan to abate their own pollution. They obliged, and Bush adopted it. Texas would have "voluntary" standards. These failed to reduce pollution; and after Bush left for Washington, they were replaced with mandatory standards. In his proposals concerning global warming, which were prepared with the help of the industry lobby the Edison Electric Institute and which, according to a British critic quoted in the Financial Times, follow "to the comma" a plan put forward by ExxonMobil, Bush has returned to voluntary standards. Outside experts not only predict that his proposals will fail to reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions; they say that under his specious new metric of "emissions intensity" emissions may actually increase.

What does Bush care if this happens? He is not a steward of the global future. For him, time ends when he leaves office. According to his policy, if the voluntary standards don't work, they can be changed after 2012—three years beyond the end of his anticipated second term.

Before September 11 "presidentialized" him, to use the historian Arthur J. Schlesinger Jr.'s term, polls suggested that Bush was coming to be seen as the happy captive of corporate interests. From the days of Andrew Jackson's attack on the Bank of the United States as a Washington-favored corporation, the nexus between government and big business has ever been a source of public anger. Two years ago a Business Week/Harris poll found that 74 percent of Americans thought that business had too much influence over politics and government. The Bush Administration was enacting their ancestral fears. Then came September 11. The crisis gave Bush permission to mitigate a political liability and to govern for a whole people under attack, not just for the funders of the Republican Party. One held one's breath. He made a stirring speech. But by October he had reverted to his biography, embracing a stimulus bill that would shower nearly $700 million in tax rebates on General Electric and $250 million on Enron. People participating in focus groups refused to believe that the President's stimulus bill contained such provisions—the provisions were so much at variance with Bush's value-charged war leader's rhetoric. Their disbelief does them credit.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.